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Building and growing a business brand can be challenging. No matter how long you have been in business, you have to continually grow and build your brand. This is doubly more difficult when you are new to the industry.

So how does a new broker build and grow their brand?

Create a brand brief

The best way is to document what your business is about. When we started Masters Broker Group in 2012, we used a brand brief. The purpose of the brand brief process was to make us write down what we wanted our brand to look and feel like? How would our customers and colleagues view our business? How would we like to engage our customers? If the business was a person, what sort of personality would it have?

You may have to take a step back and answer some fundamental questions first. Like what is your value proposition and who is your target audience or ideal customer? These are very important questions, and you should take the time to review these.

In this industry, trust plays a big role in whether someone will deal with you or not. And like it or not, how you dress has a huge effect on how people view and perceive you.

Your personal brand

What do you wish for people to associate with you when they think of you? Is there a certain subject matter in which you want to be perceived as an expert or are there general qualities you want linked to?

Things like the color, cut, and style of the clothes you wear – and even your accessories – communicate loudly.

But the way you dress also affects how we see ourselves. To boost your confidence, dress well.

Choose clothing that reflects who you are and the image you want to project.

Perception is reality. And what your customers perceive about who you are can sometimes matter.

If you have recently started in the industry, you would realise by now that a “lead” is not a lead. And an unqualified lead is not real. In fact, unqualified leads cost you – in time and money!

And unless you have a large marketing budget, how do you cut through the noise to get prospects to recognise what you do? Come to think of it, an expensive advertising campaign may not cut through the noisy marketplace if it isn’t executed well.

In his article “How to write a great business plan”, Bill Sahlman poses a number of questions that we should focus on. And the main focus of all our mortgage broking businesses should be about our customers. Less so than our competition.

For instance, if we focus our mortgage broking business on what our competitors, (for instance, the banks) were doing, we might do things a bit better than them. How are they doing it, what products and services are they providing, etc.

But most of that would be on the basic level. And we could run into the trap of being a “me-too”.

What if we focus on what the issues our clients and customers are facing? And what problems we can solve for them? Perhaps we can provide better value to our customers.

As the world of finance becomes more complex, most of us aren’t keeping up. In this series we’re exploring what it means to be financially literate.

It’s pretty common nowadays to see the likes of the Reserve Bank of Australia or the Australian Bureau of Statistics issue warnings about the size of Australian household debt. The reason is that the consequences of poor financial decisions often reach far wider than an individual or family.

The global financial crisis showed us how rapidly financial contagion can spread – one person’s debt is another person’s asset, so when the debt is written off so is the asset. However, there has been little improvement in financial literacy in the wake of the financial crisis, the lack of which was one of the underlying causes.

Want to launch your own mortgage broking business? From bookkeeping to business advice, advertising and websites, we have got you covered. Here is a list of some apps and websites that may help you launch (which we also use in our own business).

Have you ever had someone throw a difficult question at you? Here is a tip: Respond to a question with a question. Otherwise known as a “reverse”.
A reverse is when you return-serve by responding with a question yourself.

This can help you define the situation better, and help you get closere to understanding why they asked the question in the first place.